Grown-up
Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?– Edna St. Vincent Millay
God, I’m bored.
It’s not anything in particular. Just everything. It’s a combination of so much going on in life, but somehow feeling like nothing is happening at all. Today I combed through old posts from long-abandoned blogs searching for an idea, something that would spark a thought that was worth writing about. So many of my posts read as preachy and frankly they embarrass me. There are few gems.
I started on this writing experiment just a week ago, filled with inspiration and excitement. I had so much to say and it would be enough just to get it out there. And I still feel this way, but I’m finding also that it is a lonely experiment and it’s largely based on trusting myself to have the words within.
I have blips of memories that need to be written about; they need to come to paper and form into stories. They are from my past, mostly from my childhood. I have an irrational fear that if I write about all of it, I will be “all written out” with nothing left to say. I call it the David Sedaris Syndrome: there’s only so much history any one of us have and I don’t want to find myself, ten years down the line writing about talking animals because I’ve exhausted my memories (although I’ve heard his book is hilarious). It’s a strange fear – if I write about that which begs to be written about, I will have nothing left to write about, but if I don’t write, it stays inside and becomes a moot point anyway.
So I find myself writing about not being able to write. And I will forgive myself for this in the way I would forgive a friend. I will re-read the post, change some punctuation, grit my teeth and hit publish, trusting that even this, perhaps especially this, is part of the course.
